Tansy
Miraculous flower essence works directly on self-awareness; 4 drops under the tongue will cure your procrastinating, turn you into a model of healthy vigor and drive.
The Carolingian emperor Charlemagne new its qualities. So did Hildegard von ingen, Madame Restell, and the herbalist Steve Horne.
Ask President Henry Dunster of Harvard, whose corpse it helped to preserve.
Two summers ago, my neighbor in Las Vegas — an eloquent and refined man with one of the sharpest minds (and tongues) of anyone I know, a Wildean wit — admitted to me that he was depressed, and that his doldrums took the form of playing video games. If Oscar Wilde himself had materialized and told me he was a big fan of Grand Theft Auto, I could not have been more surprised. My neighbor is impressively well read, a person who recaps Thackeray novels for me as he finishes them, and with whom I discussed Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady over Zoom during the most stultifying months of the pandemic. He has serious literary aspirations, often waking at the crack of dawn to write before opening the small business he owns with his husband. And somehow, with all this talent, intelligence, and promise, he was sitting around wasting time… playing video games. Reader, forgive me: I am …
How Eddie Rabbitt Framed America
The Country Elvis of the Ford Presidency
Actually, he was a rocker from New Jersey
Still, who doesn’t love a rainy night?
Eddie Rabbitt got a record deal in 1974, a real-life example of cause and effect. He’d just written a number-one song for Ronnie Milsap, and that mattered to the folks who inhabited the fashionable record-company offices. There were more number ones to be had, they must have figured, and not the kind written in back rooms where grizzled songwriters hover over legal pads and chain-smoke Marlboros. Maybe the higher-ups thought Eddie had the right look for the Gerald Ford era.
Eddie got to tour with Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton; he wrote and sang the title song for a Clint Eastwood movie, which is hardly the stuff of a shadowy existence.
From 1975 onward, Eddie Rabbitt worked in bright light, and for a while he was ubiquitous. It’s easy to forget that there was a time when Hee Haw reached a huge TV audience, or that Barbara Mandrell and her sisters hosted a weekly variety show for a …
The Battle of Point Reyes
Kicking old-school ranchers off their land to make Silicon Valley vegans happy
Injecting elk with birth control by helicopter
How do you tell the good cows from the bad cows?
Point Reyes is a 70,000-acre protrusion that sticks out of California into the Pacific Ocean, about an hour north of San Francisco. The Point Reyes National Seashore comprises 65,000 acres of that piece of land, as a unit of the National Park Service that currently makes no sense to anyone. To my eye, it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world, and I’ve been visiting it since I was a child. It calls to me.
Archaeological evidence suggests that Point Reyes was a kind of Miwok Santa Monica for thousands of years, a pleasant and densely populated oceanfront neighborhood. Then came the Franciscans, who brought the first few cows. In the 1830s, Mexican land grants turned the Point into ranchland. In the 1850s, litigation over those grants delivered most of the Point into the hands of a San Francisco law firm — Shafter, Shafter, Park, and Heydenfeldt. Shafter and Shafter then created a dairy …
